


Ashes Lifting to the Sky

by Trapelo_Road475



Category: The Mentalist
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-10
Updated: 2013-06-10
Packaged: 2017-12-14 12:13:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/836745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trapelo_Road475/pseuds/Trapelo_Road475
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Tonight, by the freeway, a man eating fruit pie with a buckknife</p>
<p>carves the likeness of his lover's face into the motel wall."</p>
<p>- Richard Siken, "Little Beast"</p>
<p>AU.  Patrick Jane and Red John, after the end of the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ashes Lifting to the Sky

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ruuger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruuger/gifts).



Under the slender, winking moon, Patrick allows himself just a moment to shut his eyes.

To listen. To breathe. To listen.

There is the sound of wind in dead leaves that cling to trees in autumn retreat. 

It sounds like distant waves on a quiet shore. 

But not.

Patrick hasn't seen the ocean in many weeks.

The sound of the dead leaves, and the sound of the water, is not unlike the way he defines his life now.

The burn of salt and the soft, sweet smell of plants in decay.

The chill of water, the chill of wind.

The little one, blonde curls dancing in the Pacific breeze.

The woman, dark haired and eyes like a wild horse on a distant ridge. In his mind, the woman tucks a curl of hair behind her ear. She has a wide smile, open and good. The little one has her mother's smile.

Her father's curls and her mother's smile.

Patrick opens his eyes and the moon has been chased down by ravenous shreds of cloud. The wind is up but it won't rain. Not tonight.

The man he walks the long days with, beside him, hot and broad, lays an arm across him, and thumbs his lips. 

The man, who never sleeps, smiles against his neck.

...

_People are_ sick, _Patrick._

In his dream the woman he loves shouts at him, with her mustang eyes blazing. 

_Angela, Angie, I know, Angela -_

His hands up. His hands are tan. All the little blond hairs stand out. 

_They're dying, Patrick._

It's been a long summer. 

In his dream. 

The summer never ends.

_No one is dying, Angela._

That part wasn't a lie. 

Not really.

Not then.

...

"My Patrick," he says. "Will you stop thinking so loudly."

So Patrick talks instead. The man (his name is John) had found him at the tail end of summer, sitting beside a baking highway, staring fixedly at a crow that hunched and cackled in the middle of the road, towing the innards of a corpse along the asphalt. Patrick is not clear on how long he sat beside the road or how he came to it, though he knows the memory lives inside him somewhere, that if he followed the doors long enough he would find it, he would find the way he came from, but then he would have to open - 

Patrick knows he did not speak a very, very long time. 

And the man sat with him and watched the bodies decay. He didn't flinch at the smell. He just sat. He was tall and broad and he wore a red shirt and he had two knives, one long and keen and black-bladed, which he had probably bought at a store, and not for hunting. The other was small and folded up and had an antler handle with a scout emblem on it. Keepsake. A memory. Many memories. Folded and folded like white sheets, like black bags counting on the evening news, daddy, what's happening, daddy? 

_People are sick, Patrick. People are dying._

After a long time the man got up and Patrick went with him.

They walked through an untended orchard, full of almost-ripe apples.

The man said to him, "My name is John. What's yours?" A cool smile like the moon or the blade of a knife, or the beak of a crow in the guts of a body that had once been a person with a name.

Patrick had looked him in the eye, feeling something inside him falter and tug, and then at last give way.

In the orchard, he fell to his knees gasping, as if his body wanted to cry but his breath couldn't find the way past his throat, past the memories, past the door - 

_No one is dying, Angela._

He'd screamed for a while after that. John had slapped him fiercely with the heel of his palm, hard across the mouth and blood had dripped from his torn tongue into the grass.

"Patrick," he'd whispered, wet and heavy. The salt was tears or blood or the ocean. 

Humans are so much water, he'd thought.

"Patrick," John had repeated, and stroked his hair. Stroked his neck. Stroked the arch of his back. 

When John got up he followed again.

When John lay down on loose hay in an old red barn Patrick lay down with him.

_People are sick, Patrick._

_Daddy? What's going on?_

Patrick lay down with John and locked the door and thought even if he knew what was happening, it wouldn't matter, because there wasn't anyone to explain it to, anymore.

"Good Patrick, that's good."

...

John explained to him that if you just kept moving, eventually, you'd outfox them, and they'd starve.

Patrick remembered hearing that the sickness made people hungry, mad with it, and mad with thirst, too, though water drove them back. It reminded him of one of the performing dogs in the carnival, a beautiful German Shepherd, which had been bit by a raccoon one night and gone rabid, gone starved and thirsty and crazy so the man who kept the dogs had to shoot it. 

The man had burned the corpse of the dog far at the corner of the fairgrounds, in a deep pit.

Patrick remembered the smell of dead flesh searing. 

The ashes lifting to the sky.

People had burned the bodies, too. Shot the sick and burned the bodies. The piles grew. The piles rotted in the heat. The piles grew. 

Patrick remembered the smell of gasoline, the sulfur crack of a match. A blanket. It was pink. Little ducks across the edge - 

Flames leaped and ashes lifted to the sky like frightened things. Sparks lit on his skin. 

Flames gasping and gulping as they engulf a building, in the silence of the dying world, sound not unlike the distant waves.

John tells him often that he is thinking too loudly, so he speaks. Things he knows but does not remember knowing. Look, this flower. Look, this tree. Queen Anne's Lace. Black-eyed Susans. Jewelweed. Silver maple. Sugar maple. Red maple.

There are birds in the sky and rabbits in the hills and fish in the water. Dead dogs by the road and feral cats stalking the fences. Someone's horses, no one's horses, cantering in a field.

John kills a rabbit, guts it, skins it, cooks it.

Patrick watches him. Patrick tells John a story he heard as a child about a trickster rabbit.

Flesh over fire.

Patrick throws up bile amid the wildflowers.

They share the rabbit. And the fire.

John lies down in the earth and Patrick lies down with him. There is a smile in his neck and hands on his skin.

"My Patrick."

...

In the dream he closes their eyes with his trembling hand.

In the dream their blood paints his sinuses with the smell of metal.

In the dream he can't get away from it.

The lock is broken. The door is open. In the dream. Where he can't get away.

In the dream he doesn't leave the house before he drops the match.

...

The moon is high and thin as the claw of a cat and he rolls over and puts his mouth against John's cold smile so the screams won't get out from his lungs, or maybe John will just swallow them up.

He has the kind of smile that could do that.

Swallow up the screams.

Under the cat's-claw moon, dizzy with dreaming, Patrick feels like they are the only people left alive in the world, the only people left not starving, only craving. Cold smile. Hot flesh. Swallowing screams. The taste of blood that will never go away. The sound of the ocean. The sound of the trees.

Sick, dying, dead, burned, alone, screaming.

"Hold still."

Shut the door. 

"My Patrick."

Lock it tight.


End file.
